If This Is a Civil War, Pick a Side: Donald Trump, White Nationalism and the Future of America
History will judge you for your choice.
Sometimes America feels like the movie Groundhog Day: a place where we keep waking up again and again to the same crap, hoping against hope that this time — no really, this time — things will be different.
Photo Credit: Martin / Flickr
So this time, the videotape of the police officer shooting the unarmed black teenager will lead to that officer's conviction and imprisonment. And then the alarm goes off and we are awakened from our dream state, just like we were the time before and the time before, forced to reckon with a seemingly endless repetition of horribleness.
Or this time, as we watch tens of thousands of disproportionately black and poor people stranded in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the nation as a whole will finally come to understand what those left behind had already known, and for a very long time: namely, that black lives really don't matter, and won't until we demand they do. Again, the alarm disturbs our slumber. And again, we hit the snooze button.
Or this time, when yet another white kid shoots up his classroom, or another white serial killer murders a dozen people, buries them under the house or cannibalizes them, we will have our eyes opened to the fact that pathology and deviance are far from the exclusive purview of persons of color. So too when rich white men nearly bring the economy to its knees with financial chicanery so egregious as to make the most industrious of black or brown street criminals seem like rank amateurs by comparison. But then comes the alarm, a clarion that shakes us from our stupor, allowing us to go right back to fearing the usual suspects all over again.
And now, with the white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, we hope that out of such a tragedy we may finally come to appreciate the sickness of racism, and the indelible stain still besmirching the soil and politics of our nation so many years on. But in order for people to learn, they typically require teachers who are qualified to lead them to enlightenment. Events alone rarely do the trick and wisdom infrequently emerges fully formed from the well of good intentions, let alone fervent aspiration. Some assembly is required.
Sadly, we are in a classroom, so to speak, being taught by a man lacking even the most rudimentary pedagogical skills, devoid of content knowledge, and without the temperament to convey even the most obvious of lessons. A lesson one might think we had learned by now, but no: namely, that white supremacy is a death cult—a truth attested to by the bodies of millions of people of color through the years, not to mention several hundred thousand whites who died fighting that cult or defending it, from the Civil War to World War II. This cult cannot be accommodated. It cannot be excused. It must be condemned and it must be defeated as a mentality, as a movement, and as a structurally ingrained social and economic reality. And if its adherents cannot be deprogrammed, then they must be defeated, without the least bit of sentimentality.
But the teacher does not understand the lesson, and so here we are. Instead, he has reverted to type, providing succor to the most extreme elements of the far-right fringe. Whether for reasons of true affinity, or the perception that such forces represent a substantial portion of his base without whom his approval ratings would fall even further, or because condemning them forthrightly would appear to him — a man who apologizes for nothing and is loath to admit he has ever made a mistake — as weakness, matters not. The results are all the same, no matter his intentions.
To say of those in the so-called "alt-right" who descended upon Charlottesville, that "not all" of them were white supremacists, and that there were "some very fine people" among them, as Trump claimed yesterday, is to miss the point by such a wide margin that it calls into question whether this man is even remotely in charge of his faculties. Even if one were to allow that some among them were not Nazis, not supporters of organizer Richard Spencer's calls for the creation of a "white ethno-state," and not enamored of the rabid anti-Semitism that characterized the event from beginning to end, it was, after all, a rally to "Unite the Right." In other words, to put aside whatever picayune differences might separate mere opponents of economic globalism from those who openly joke about pushing Jews into ovens, all in the name of reactionary solidarity.
It was an event intended to blur the very distinctions that the erstwhile leader of the free world would now have us make. It was an event to say, loudly and proudly, that among the right there should be no infighting, no rancor, no division. In short, it was an event intended to convey the message that even the ones who aren't neo-Nazis are willing to make common cause with those who are. As the Proud Boys—a mostly misogynistic group dedicated to "Western chauvinism"—have put it, there should be no "punching right," among their side's members. They are all one thing, not because I say so, but because they do.
Not fine people, let alone very fine people, but rather, rotten fruit from a poisoned tree.
If I were a fine person and found myself at a march where, to my shock and horror, neo-Nazis and other bigots were featured, and I could see them with their swastikas, and their National Socialist Movement banners, and I could hear them yelling "f**k you faggots" at clergy and other peaceful protesters and hurling racial slurs about blacks, and chanting "blood and soil" (the direct English translation of a Nazi slogan), I would immediately leave, taking with me my profound embarrassment at having been so misled, so duped into believing this was just going to be a nice rally for conservative principles. That is what a very fine person would do, and even then, only after having ripped the swastikas from the hands of those holding them in disgust.
In fact, you know what "very fine people" would do to neo-Nazis? They would yell at them. They would defend themselves if need be. And yes, they might even mace them or punch them in the mouth. Very fine people detest Nazis. In fact, detesting Nazis might be a bona fide requirement — the de minimus definition — for being considered a very fine person.
This is not to say I always find the tactics of Antifa to be helpful or strategic, because I don't. But to suggest, as the president did, that they are in some way the moral equivalent of those they were protesting — or perhaps even worse because at least the neo-Nazis had a permit! — is an act of moral inversion so putrid as to boggle the imagination. Whatever one thinks of Antifa tactics, there is simply a difference, and not a small one, between people who call for the purging of people of color and Jews from a nation, and those who fight back against people who call for those things. And if we say there is no difference between advocating genocide and oppression and resisting those who advocate genocide and oppression, then we are headed quickly to a place that puts equal moral condemnation upon the leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising as with those they were fighting. We are suggesting that the enslaved, who often resisted their owners violently, were no better than those who held them in bondage. We are suggesting that the kidnapped who slits the throat of her captor in the middle of the night is no better than the one who took her. And this is a perversion.
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by Tim Wise
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Tim Wise is intelligent and eloquent.
Excellent article.
At times you have to think that it may be best to fight fire with fire. That in itself is a moral decision.
1958 in N.C. the KKK was attacked and destroyed never to be a factor again in Robeson county NC.
The Battle of Hays Pond.
Bravo Lumbee !
Tim Wise has a bunch of excellent YouTube videos, but beware: you may end up spending a lot of time...